This chapter examines several feminist approaches to the study and practice of international relations. It highlights the similarities between these approaches, but also the differences. It does this first by tracing the interventions made by feminists into international relations and the creation of a distinctly feminist IR agenda. Second, it uses the ‘gender lens’ to demonstrate and analyse how experiences and understandings in international relations can be ‘gendered’. Finally, it explains and examines the critiques made by the different feminist approaches to international relations.

Much translanguaging and translinguality scholarship focuses on defending and celebrating recognizable forms of language difference – e.g., “Chinglish” – as creativity and agency by the socioeconomically precarious manifesting a micropolitics of resistance. This focus obscures the concrete labour of all utterances, whether deemed conventional or not, by all language users, whether “native” or not, contributing to maintaining and revising language as practice, and, hence, obscures the dependence of dominant culture’s continuity on such labor and, hence, its precarity. Samples from the assigned writing of a bilingual (French/English) student attending a required US undergraduate writing course are shown to exhibit a mix of conventional and unconventional linguistic forms and, more importantly, writerly agency in the writing’s manifestation of criticality toward dominant views of first-year undergraduate writing students as mere recipients of others’ knowledge and its deft deployment of language to produce knowledge. Shifting to a focus on language users’ contribution of their labor to maintaining and revising language and knowledge can bring out the agency of all utterances, the status of criticality and creativity as the norm of language use, the emergent character of language, and, thus, the precarity of dominant culture.

The purpose of this essay is to address the four organizing questions of the workshop. First, I discuss my own neoclassical realist staged theory of peacemaking, which incorporates other various subparadigms of realist thought, including balance of threat and hegemonic peace theories.My model is premised on the idea thatpeacemaking must begin as a top-down venture for the reasons realists and rationalists suggest, but that after a peace treaty or its equivalent is achieved, stable peace requires the treaty to be socialized using mechanisms derived from liberal and constructivist mechanisms. Second, I compare my paradigmatic model to other peacebuilding paradigms, emphasizing the ways in which atop-down approach to interstate peacemaking is derived from realist and rationalist theories of international politics and explain how it compares to the leading alternative approach, which is a bottom-up approach derived from liberal and constructivist theories. I address the implications my hybrid model has for the quest for a “positive” peace.Finally, I address the obstacles to peace and the policy recommendations that flow from my model.

The history of Maya research is a relatively short yet eventful one, peppered with field-changing discoveries and spirited theoretical debates. To fully appreciate what is at stake in deciding on a model for Classic Maya politics, and how we reached the point we now have, it is necessary to retrace the development of interpretation through time, isolating the contested questions and explaining how scholars have marshalled evidence to support one position or another. Since data and analysis are intrinsically entwined they are here treated within a common narrative, stretching from the period of first European encounters to the state of the field today. The division into eras, latterly 20-year spans, is patently arbitrary, but it does allow section titles to capture the general character of their times.